Armed Forces claim disappeared FARC computer was 'useless' .

Colombia's armed forces on Tuesday admitted that personnel violated the chain of custody in submitting the missing computer of a FARC commander and that, conveniently, the computer never had a hard drive.

Colombia's armed forces commander, General Alejandro Navas, admitted Tuesday to local media that a chain of custody was broken in submitting a laptop belonging to FARC commander Henry Castellanos Garzon,alias "Romaņa," and allegedly passed through five different hands before "disappearing."

However, Navas also claimed that the computer had no hard drive and held no useful information, reported newspaper El Espectador.

According to newspaper El Tiempo, General Navas claimed that an intelligence expert, upon finding the rebel's computer, supposedly "determined that the computer had no hard disk," therefore rendering the lost computer virtually useless in the first place for investigation.

2. Very reminiscent of the "miracle laptop," eh?

The U.S./Colombia dropped 500 lb. U.S. "smart bombs" on the FARC hostage and peace negotiation camp of FARC commander Raul Reyes--the most peace-minded of the FARC leaders--on the border between Ecuador and Colombia, in March 2008, slaughtering 25 sleeping people including Reyes, in an effort to stop a peace movement that had been growing in the region (to end Colombia's 70 year civil war). Reyes was about to release Ingrid Betancourt. Her family had been notified, and Swiss, French and Spanish envoys were on route to the camp to receive her when they were warned off by a source that remains anonymous, and told that "everybody in that camp is going to be killed."

After blowing the camp to smithereens, supposedly the Colombian military (more U.S. involvement?) then raided over the border (into Ecuador) shooting any survivors in the back as they fled for their lives and allegedly finding Reyes' intact laptop computer in the ruins. Colombia's mafia don (er...president), Alvaro Uribe, then began claiming that the laptop contained evidence that the leftist presidents of Venezuela and Ecuador were helping the FARC to obtain a "dirty bomb" and other wild charges. In a plot worthy of Rumsfeld's "Office of Special Plans" (and with some interesting evidence that Rumsfeld might have had a hand in it), and with Uribe trying to foment war between the U.S./Colombia and Ecuador/Venezuela, this laptop underwent a similar vetting process to the one in the OP, with a compromised "chain of custody" (Colombian military), and its wild and absurd charges were ultimately proven to be entirely bogus.

Likely, the bombing/raid on Ecuador's border in 2008 was orchestrated from the "war room" in the U.S. embassy (much like the phony "rescue" of Betancourt some time later, with a live video feed, etc.). The bombing may have been conducted by a U.S. drone, but if not a drone, then the pilot and plane very likely came from the U.S. air base in Manta, Ecuador. (The Ecuadoran military has said that the Colombian military did not have that capability, and the U.S. air base, run by Dyncorp, was still ensconced in Ecuador at the time. They were evicted in 2009.)

There is also evidence that the U.S. embassy (Bush Junta-appointed U.S. ambassador William Brownfield) was helping Uribe to spy on judges and prosecutors and draw up hit lists for Uribe's death squads, to assassinate labor union leaders and others. There are many secrets in Colombia about U.S./Bush Junta crimes in Colombia, which I think Leon Panetta has played an active role in covering up.

Panetta was a member of Bush Sr.'s "Iraq Study Group"--i.e., "old CIA"--and among his missions from Bush Sr., in addition to the major missions of ousting Rumsfeld and curtailing Cheney in the final two years of the Bush Junta, preventing Cheney/Rumsfeld from nuking Iran, and ending the war between the CIA and the Pentagon that Cheney/Rumsfeld had started--was the mission of protecting Jr. in particular from prosecution and cleaning his trail, in Colombia among other places. I wonder if this 'disappeared' hard drive (the OP laptop) had relevance to U.S./Bush Junta crimes in Colombia, in addition to the obvious--that it likely contained info on Colombia military and/or Uribe drug trafficking and death squad murders.

Obama/Panetta and their man in Bogota, Colombia's new president Manuel Santos, have had quite a lot of work to do to prep Colombia for its role in U.S. "free trade for the rich" with a subcategory role of Big Pharma/Big Ag's takeover of the illicit drug trade, through legalization. Uribe got rid of FIVE MILLION peasant farmers for them--in THE worst human displacement crisis on earth. The FBI/DEA are taking care of the small players in California (prison, ruination of lives and families, confiscation of their property, shutdown of businesses that are LEGAL in California)--the medical marijuana growers who have developed and refined the product and developed the market. Meanwhile, Santos has come out publicly for complete legalization of drugs--an odd, or rather, flabbergasting development, until you realize what the "free trade for the rich" corporate plan is.

(This is why it surprises me not at all that ES&S/Diebold passed initiatives legalizing marijuana in Colorado and Washington, yesterday. Big Pharma/Big Ag's moment has come. Prepare yourself for GMO-ized marijuana over the counter at your local liquor store!)

The Uribe-Bush-CIA-bankster connections had to be erased. Uribe has to be (and has been) sidelined (with Panetta landing him on a "silk cushion," from what I can gather). And all the trails leading back to U.S. crimes in Colombia--through whatever meandering paths--have to be dusted over--a process that was begun by Uribe and Brownfield with their midnight extraditions of death squad witnesses to the U.S., circa 2010, and their 'burial' in the U.S. federal prison system, out of the reach of Colombian prosecutors and over their objections.

Is this OP laptop part of that erasure? Or is it more a local matter (local corruption)? (I hope somebody's investigating this "intelligence expert" who claims to have found the laptop with the hard drive already missing. Sounds like it's a matter of interest to Colombian prosecutors but even if they pursue it, if the U.S. was involved, they might not get anywhere.)

Anyway, I keep hoping that this sealed egg might be crackable. I strongly suspect that Bush Junta crime goes way beyond what we know--the Iraq War, torture, mind-boggling theft--or what many suspect (9/11, for instance)--and probably the only way that knowledge of their OTHER crimes is going to reach us is from the outside in--through other countries where the crimes occurred, and/or via courageous investigators, prosecutors and others in those countries. The coverup here has been signed, sealed and delivered. Bush Jr. & Co. have been totally immunized, here. No truth about them will ever be told here, by our political/corporate establishment. They are to be forgotten! (And that, in my opinion, is one of the chief reasons why ES&S/Diebold let Obama win.)

3. maybe all the Bush secret crimes are on the missing hard drive?? n/s

4. Yup, for instance, what WAS Blackwater doing...

...to get "fined" by the State Department (H. Clinton) for "unauthorized" "trainings" of "foreign persons" IN COLOMBIA "for use in Iraq and Afghanistan"? And was it really "unauthorized"? And, if not, who "authorized" it? And what did the "trainings" consist of? 'Turkey shoots' of Colombian peasants? What did they DO to get this handslap? And was the handslap itself a cover up?

Or, who WAS that "American" who was liaising between Uribe's vast illegal domestic spying agency, DAS, and the U.S. embassy in Bogota?

Or, was there any connection between the USAID/Pentagon, Afghanistan-like "pacification" program in La Macarena, Colombia, and the mass grave that was found in La Macarena?

Or, who are the "favored" drug lords who keep shoveling cocaine to the U.S. with impunity, and is there any connection between them and say, the Bushwhack DEA, or the Bushwhacks' "made man" Alvaro Uribe?

Items like this may well have meandering trails that could turn up on any number of entities' laptops.

You typically use exaggeration to ridicule what I said. ("...maybe all the Bush secret crimes are on the missing hard drive??"--you). But I didn't say that--"all." I said maybe some tracks and trails of some of them--sufficiently worrisome for some interested party to deep-six the hard drive. When laptops get messed with by violations of "chain of custody"--and especially when hard drives disappear, as with this one, or get modified thousands of times, as with the "miracle laptop," and especially when Bushwhacks were in charge of $7 BILLION-plus in donations of our tax dollars to the Colombian military, we really should perk up. Could be local corruption, as I said. Could be a trail to Bushwhack crime. I'd start with finding out whether or not the "intelligence expert" who allegedly found this laptop with the hard drive allegedly already disappeared was an American intelligence agent or working for a U.S. intelligence (military or other) agency. And WHERE did this empty laptop turn up? In whose office? In whose trash dump? In what country?

The OP raises lots of questions. I'm asking them. And you...well, what are you doing?

5. Blackwater

The Blackwater case is as follows:

The State Department has huge security needs (or, they think they do) around the world. They put out contracts for those. There are 4-5 companies that specialize in it. While at the top of the security teams are ex-seal types, the vast majority of the security teams are low-level guards recruited in third world countries. The big one right now is Uganda. These guys get paid 600-800 dollars per month, although they have no expenses. So, Ugandan guy takes the job, gets trained in Uganda, then goes overseas for two years and makes what is for Uganda, good money.

I know all this, by the way, because when I was living in Kenya a guy in my apartment building worked for one of these companies. He was bidding on a large contract using Kenyans, and lost to a company using Ugandans.

Anyway, Blackwater wanted to get in on these large scale projects and was looking for a nation to source this sort of labor and settled on Colombia. I think the thought was that the Colombians would be paid the same, but be better guards as there were large numbers of ex-soldiers and police in Colombia needing employment. Whereas in Africa even your average soldier is not well trained or disciplined.

Anyway, under the ITAR rules for arms sales, training is considered a military good. So, not only can you not sell weapons to a foreign country without state department approval, you also can't provide military training.

Blackwater was fined for going to Colombia and training guys (they had won a contract) without state department approval.

Here is where it gets a bit tricky though: The contracting officer who gave blackwater the contract certainly at least knew that the labor was being sourced from Colombia. Also, it is hard to believe that the Blackwater people simply forgot to dot there i's and cross their t's.

So, their fine seems pretty high for something that on the surface was not really a big deal. That is, even if Blackwater neglected to get state department approval, Colombia is not on the ITAR blacklist so punishment typically should have been minimal.

So, possibilities include that the charges were part of the ongoing feud between the CIA and Erik Prince, OR, perhaps Blackwater was training these guys for someone else... perhaps Dubai or Bahrain.